I can't remember the last time I made a blog entry to draw attention to a particular book, but we just got our copy of The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book
in the mail yesterday and it is so good that we felt like we had to
tell everybody about it. I like to judge books by covers (not
exclusively, but still...) so I knew I was going to like this one as
soon as I pulled it out of the box:

Wow! This Gord Hill
guy is NOT messing around! And the inside is even better. I like it
because 1) everything is unambiguously presented from a Native warrior's
perspective; and 2) the information is both factually correct and
meticulously distilled down to its skeletal minimum to help the reader
(that would be you) focus attention on the basic moral and ethical
questions that lie at the heart of each historical example. Some people
might think this book is only about death and devastation, but to me
this book is more about living and surviving.

Pinky and I read the entire comic book last night, it took us only a few
hours. Now Kim is reading it. After Kim & Mimi are done, we'll be
passing it along to someone else. I think that's what it was designed
for. It's not big - just long enough to present a very basic outline of
colonization and genocide in the Americas (more emphasis on North
America) - but it's also short enough that people who can't or won't do
fat books will feel encouraged to pick it up and start reading it right
away. Plus it's a comic book - this is a teaching tool with amazing
possibilities!

Who should read this book? I'll say "everybody", although it's
predicable that a lot of indoctrinated citizens of the settler state
('serious' teachers, students, and activists included) will feel more
turned off than enlightened by it. (Nothing new there, these are the
same people that think Ward Churchill got fired for committing academic
indiscretions or that there's good kinds and bad kinds of resistance in
the face of genocide.) What excites me most about material like this is
that it has the potential to throw open a whole universe of histories
and wisdom already recorded by hundreds and thousands of Indigenous
writers and warriors, to practically anyone with a hunger for truth and
justice, Native or settler. I know these people are out there.

So here is a book that also happens to be powerful medicine. What will be done with it?

[ note from pinky: I wanted to mention that the book also includes a
powerful introduction and five pages of "recommended readings" by Ward
Churchill, which will probably turn into my reading list for the next
three or five years! ~pinky ]